A missing-persons case isn’t what it seems in this page-turning thriller from CWA Silver Dagger Award–winning author Sarah Dunant

Tough-talking PI Hannah Wolfe takes whatever cases she can get. This time, it’s a missing person: Carolyn Hamilton, a twenty-three-year-old ballet dancer, has seemingly vanished into thin air. But while Hannah chases down dead-end leads, the dancer’s body is fished out of the Thames. She was eight months pregnant.

The police claim she committed suicide, but Hannah doesn’t buy the official verdict. The private eye refuses to believe that Carolyn would kill herself and her unborn child, but she’s convinced that her death is somehow connected to the pregnancy. Hannah’s quest to find the baby’s father takes her to France, where an unusual ad Carolyn answered leads to an old, moneyed family keeping monstrous secrets. And not even Hannah can guess at a deception that stretches back decades. Forced to confront her own ambivalent feelings about commitment and motherhood, Hannah won’t rest until she gets justice for Carolyn—even if it means risking her own life.

This thinking person’s thriller from New York Times–bestselling author Sarah Dunant introduces a female sleuth—reminiscent of P. D. James’s Cordelia Gray, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone—who readers are bound never to forget.

Birth Marks is the 1st book in the Hannah Wolfe Crime Novels, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.